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The nine wards where independents are still battling it out in runoffs with other candidates are (IVI-IPO endorsed candidates in italics) the 4th (incumbent Timothy Evans vs. Tony Preckwinkle), 10th (former alderman John Buchanan vs. Clem Balanoff), 20th (incumbent Arenda Troutman vs. Dino McNeal), 27th (incumbent Sheneather Butler vs. Rickey Hendon), 29th (incumbent Sam Burrell vs. Iola McGowan), 31st (Regner Suarez vs. Gloria Chevere), 37th (incumbent Percy Giles vs. John Baggett), 46th (incumbent Helen Shiller vs....

ODD ODDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your mistake was not realizing that opening Door #3 tells you more about Door #2 than about the door you originally picked. The reason for this is subtle. The host, in picking Door #3, does not choose from the full set of doors but rather from the subset of doors you did not pick. Each subset’s probability of winning does not change but the probability for a particular door in the second subset does....

Is it true that Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry VIII, had a sixth finger and three breasts? –Anonymous, Chicago Ooh, you’re so nasty, A.–ordinarily a quality we prize in this department, but in this case disproportionate to the facts. Annie did have some physical defects that her many detractors interpreted as signs of the devil, but she was hardly the sideshow freak that some (e.g., The Book of Lists) have made her out to be....

Theater-Industry Retreat: A Hot Time at Alpine Valley Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then the fireworks began. At the first retreat session, the past week’s events were put up for discussion. Eileen LaCario, marketing director of the Candlelight Dinner Playhouse and one of the new board members elected, calmly rose to explain what the commercial producers hoped to help accomplish as part of the board–goals that included better management of League affairs and increased attention to industry-wide marketing initiatives....

Art Dealers Get Ethical Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both Hammer and Adams downplayed any suggestion that the formation of the new committee is directly linked to recent media coverage of local art dealers Donald Austin and R.H. Love, neither of whom was ever a member of CADA. Austin was accused and found guilty of selling phony prints; Love is currently being sued both for selling fakes and for inflating prices....

Bob Dylan is playing mostly covers these days. Unlike most rock performers, when he goes out on tour he rarely does more than one or two songs off his latest album (or three or four most recent albums). What he does instead is choose–with varying degrees of creativity from tour to tour and night to night–from a vast catalog of a generation’s classics, some 350 to 400 songs in all. They are his songs, of course, but the great majority of the interesting ones were written by someone else a long time ago....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I would like to start by thanking the Reader for covering the Chicago dance scene so well and contributing to the vitality of our art form. And then I would like to respond to a review of my choreography that was in the November 27 edition of the Reader. In the article my work was criticized because my dances do not have “beginnings, middles, and ends” and “conflict/resolution,” with implications that these are things I should learn to do....

Chicago to Washington: No Go Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gail Kalver, managing director of the Hubbard Street Dance Company, says she intends to pursue a Kennedy Center engagement this summer anyway. “We had a letter of intent to appear at the Kennedy Center,” she says. “We’re going to find out if it’s worth anything.” The dance company had turned down other offers in order to participate in the Washington festival....

A very enjoyable documentary survey of American comic books, from their inception in 1933 to the present, by Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann (Imagine the Sound, Poetry in Motion). Newspaper comic strips such as Little Nemo in Slumberland, Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Li’l Abner, and Peanuts are omitted, but within the comic-book field, Mann’s reach is fairly broad, extending from diverse superheroes such as Superman and the Fantastic Four to EC Comics to underground artists such as Robert Crumb and Spain Rodrigues to recent figures such as Art Spiegelman, Lynda Barry, and Sue Coe....

Maybe you remember the type from your high school days: a raunchy guy who talked about sex in the most casual and clinical ways, putting you at such ease that there was nothing you were reluctant to ask him. Dr. Ruth, but with a leer. Donahue, but in graphic detail. “I’m Mr. Condom, the rubber man,” he says, puffing out his stomach. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Trip into Panisiak’s stock of vintage condoms, and you can choose from old tins of Sheiks and Ramses (priced up to $75), and Black Cats, dark rubbers that authorities long ago pulled from circulation because the carbon that made them black leaked onto customers’ privates....

Big-city ecosystems feature large populations of a very small number of species. Natural ecosystems, outside of a few very difficult environments that offer few niches, tend to move in the opposite direction. The natural tendency reaches its apotheosis in the tropical forest, where rarity is the common condition of a bewildering number of species. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A typical Chicago neighborhood–a neighborhood of single-family houses mixed with two- and three-flats, with maybe a somewhat larger apartment building on the corner–will have pigeons too, though more will feed there than nest there, along with house sparrows and starlings....

Twelve foreign and American films on Jewish themes, presented at four different locations in Chicago, Skokie, and Park Forest by the Marvin N. Stone Centre for Jewish Arts & Letters. Admission varies, from $3 to $5, depending on the location, for information, call 761-9100. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » THE CAFETERIA Short feature about the transformation of a Jewish cafeteria from exclusive ethnic haven to minority melting pot....

AS YOU LIKE IT Oak Park Festival Theatre Most folks seem to consider A Midsummer Night’s Dream the essential Shakespearean outdoor play. I prefer As You Like It. Both comedies offer up an enchanted forest, ruled by Love, where madness is a form of doting, deceit is playful, and evil simply can’t survive. But the enchantment in As You Like It is quieter and more natural, the humor drier and more rueful than in A Midsummer Night’s Dream....

I once saw a wild-eyed Anton Fier (in Richard Hell’s band at the time) jump out from behind his drum kit in midset to attack an audience member who was apparently flipping lit cigs at the bandstand. So I have no trouble believing persistent reports of what a moody, intense guy he supposedly is. Besides, it shows in his work: Fier, who’s played with the Feelies, the Lounge Lizards, Pere Ubu, Laurie Anderson, Herbie Hancock, et al, has a darkly fascinating drumming style that suggests a driven, obsessed personality at work....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the Block segment was generally accurate, it unfortunately perpetuates a longstanding myth which was previously restricted to the legal community. At page 18, Jenkins writes, “Johnson (the defense attorney) and his client certainly didn’t want this case to go to trial. So, before trial, Johnson offered Corboy $9 million to settle the case.” That statement is blatantly untrue....

Italian composer Luigi Nono, who died a couple of years ago, wrote some of the most beautiful and politically impassioned scores of the postwar period. In the last decade of his fife he lavished most of his creativity on his final opera, Prometheus, based on the myth as interpreted by philosopher Walter Benjamin, and Post-Praeludium per Donau (1987) is one of the many sketches that came out of the composition process....

Lead Story Irene Marsh, 68, was arrested in April for tampering with public records after she allegedly posed as a federal judge and placed in court records a judgment previously issued on her own behalf in a 1988 case. The real judge had changed his mind after writing the original judgment and thrown out her lawsuit, in which she claimed her unleashed dog was unconstitutionally detained. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

I’ve only seen about half of Robert Kramer’s 253-minute epic, but I can certainly recommend it very highly on that basis. This is a fictional documentary in which a character named Doc (Paul McIsaac), who figured in two earlier Kramer films, travels with cinematographer-director Kramer from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida, looking for a job and a home while taking in what’s been happening to this country lately. Doc attends a Pat Robertson-for-president meeting in New Hampshire, visits Walden Pond, and is interviewed for a job in a Manhattan ghetto school....

Look, I’m lately feeling a little sick of rock ‘n’ roll, OK? Sick of studied “rebelliousness,” sick of black leather jackets, sick of bands selling “passion,” “edge,” and “redemption,” and sick of fame-hungry guitarists trying to be mysterious and sexy. And believe me, when the entire rock ‘n’ pop scene starts to sound like just a lot of boring, unoriginal noise (rappers excepted, of course), bands like Shrimp Boat become that much more precious....

Heavy reading. From the Animals’ Agenda (November 1990): “The Glendale, Calif., library boasts the nation’s largest collection of cat-related art, music, and literature, a total of over 1,200 pounds.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Forget about the decline in SAT scores–here’s real evidence of a decline in brainpower among the general public: mass-transit ridership in the Chicago area dropped from 817 million rides in 1980 to 678 million rides in 1989....